A Half Forgotten Song (4 page)

With the receiver pressed hard to his ear, Zach stared at the Aubrey drawing in the catalog. It was of a young man with a faraway expression; straight, fair hair falling into his eyes, fine features, a sharp nose and chin. Wholesome, slightly raffish. A face that conjured up images of boys’ school cricket matches; mischief in the dorm room; pilfered sandwiches and midnight feasts.
Dennis,
it was called, and dated 1937. The third drawing of the young man Zach had seen by Aubrey, and with this one, more strongly than ever, he knew that something was wrong. It was like hearing a cracked bell chime. Something was off-key, flawed.

“How does that sound?” Zach echoed, clearing his throat.
Impossible. Out of the question
. He hadn’t even looked at his half-constructed manuscript, his reams of notes, for over six months.

“Yes, how does it sound? Are you all right, Zach?”

“I’m fine, yes . . . I’m . . .” He trailed into silence. He had abandoned the book—one more project that had petered to nothing—because it was turning out just like every other book about Aubrey he had ever read. He’d wanted to write something new about the man and his work, something that would show a unique insight, possibly the kind of insight only a relative, a secret grandson, would be able to give. Halfway through he’d realized he had no such insight. The text was predictable, and covered well-trodden ground. His love for Aubrey and his work was all too obvious, but that was not enough. He had all the knowledge, all the notes. He had his passion for the subject. But he didn’t have an angle. He should just tell David Fellows that and have done with it, he thought. Let this other Aubrey man get his book published. With a pang, Zach realized he’d probably have to pay back the publication advance, modest as it was. He wondered where on earth he might get that money back from, and almost laughed out loud.

But the picture on the page in front of him kept pulling at his attention.
Dennis.
What was that expression, on the young man’s face? It was so hard to pin down. One minute he looked wistful, the next mischievous, and then he looked sad, full of regret. It shifted like the light on a windy day, as if the artist couldn’t quite capture it, couldn’t quite commit the mood to paper. And that was what Charles Aubrey did, that was where his genius lay. He could pin an emotion to paper like nobody else; catch a fleeting thought, a personality. Portray it with such clarity and skill that his subjects came to life on the paper. And even when the expression was ambiguous, it was because the mood of the sitter had been the same. Ambiguity itself was something he could draw. But this was different. Wholly different. This looked as though the artist couldn’t decipher, couldn’t recapture the sitter’s mood. It seemed impossible to Zach that Charles Aubrey would produce such an incomplete picture, and yet the pencil strokes, the shading, were like a signature in themselves . . . But then there was the question of the date, as well. The date was all wrong.

“I’ll do it,” he said suddenly, startling himself. Tension made his voice abrupt.

“You will?” David Fellows sounded surprised, and not quite convinced.

“Yes. I’ll get it to you early next year. As soon as I can.”

“Right . . . great. Fantastic to hear, Zach. I’ll admit, I’d rather thought you’d hit a wall of some kind with it. You’d sounded so sure you had something really fresh on the subject, but then time started to tick along . . .”

“Yes, I know. Sorry. But I will finish it.”

“Well, all right then. Great stuff. I shall tell the powers that be that my faith in you was entirely justified,” said David, and behind the words Zach heard the slight misgiving, the gentle warning.

“Yes. It was,” Zach said, his mind churning furiously.

“Well then, I had better get on. And, if I may be so bold, so had you.”

In the lull after the call ended, Zach cleared his dry throat and listened to his mind racing, and almost laughed aloud again. Where on earth could he start? There was one obvious answer, and only one. He looked back at the catalog, and down the page to the provenance of the drawing of Dennis.
From a private collection in Dorset.
The seller with no name again, just as before. Three pictures of Dennis had now emerged from this mysterious collection, and two of Mitzy as well. All in the last six years. All apparently studies for final paintings that nobody had ever seen. And there was only one place in Dorset that Zach could think to start looking for the source of them. He got to his feet and went upstairs to pack.

CHAPTER TWO

I
n the bed that had been her mother’s, and still sagged where Valentina’s body had once lain, Dimity was visited. Since the night she saw Celeste, her dreams had been populous, bustling with the long gone, and the long dead. They waited for her to shut her eyes and then they edged closer, on silent feet, flitting out of distant hiding places and announcing themselves only with the hint of a scent, a murmured word, or an expression they often wore. Celeste’s fierce eyes; Charles’s hands, flecked with paint; the quizzical tilt of Delphine’s brows; Élodie stamping her foot. Valentina, breathing fire. And with them came feelings, each one washing over Dimity like a wave, making it hard to breathe. They towed her far from land, so she couldn’t put her feet down, couldn’t rest or be safe. Fighting not to drown. An enveloping sea of remembered faces and voices, swirling and surging so that she woke with her stomach churning and her head so full she couldn’t remember the time, or the place. They had questions for her, each and every one of them. Questions only Dimity could answer. They wanted the truth; they wanted her reasons; they wanted retribution.

And once her eyes were used to the dark, and could pick out the pale outlines of the window and the familiar furniture, the crescendo lulled a little and the foreboding came back. The feeling that somebody was coming, and that because of this stranger everyone Dimity had lost, and everyone she feared, would come to lurk in the dark corners of the house and wait, just out of sight, for the chance to make their demands. They would demand truths she had hidden for decades; hidden from everybody, sometimes even from herself. Their demands would get louder, Dimity realized. Panic quivered in her gut. They would get stronger, unless she found some way to hold them off. Wide awake she lay, humming softly so that she wouldn’t hear them, and strove to discern if the one who was coming would be friend to her, or foe.

T
he village of Blacknowle lay in a fold of the rolling Dorset coastline to the east of the villages of Kimmeridge and Tyneham—that strange ghost village appropriated by the War Office in 1943 as a training ground for troops and then never returned to its residents. Zach’s parents had taken him to the village when he was a child, as part of an August bank holiday break in the area. Zach most clearly remembered Lulworth Cove, because there’d been an ice cream—much hankered after but rarely had—and the beach’s perfect, round crescent had seemed so unreal, almost like something from another country. He’d filled his pockets with the smooth white pebbles until the lining split, and cried when his mother made him empty them out before getting back into the car.
You can keep one,
his dad had said, shooting his fractious mother a thunderous look. Now Zach wondered how he’d failed to realize how unhappy they were. In Blacknowle itself, his father had wandered the short streets with an expectant look on his face, as if he was sure of finding something, or someone. Whatever it was, by the end of the holiday the look was gone; replaced by a settled sadness and disappointment. There’d been disappointment of another kind on his mother’s face.

Zach followed a lane so narrow that dusty lengths of cow parsley whipped his mirrors on either side. On the backseat were a hastily packed suitcase and a cardboard box containing all the notes he had accumulated for his book on Charles Aubrey. There were more than he remembered. The box’s handles had sagged dangerously when he’d heaved it out from under his bed. His laptop was zipped up in its bag next to the box, full of pictures of Elise and ways of contacting her; and that was all he had with him.
No,
he corrected himself ruefully.
That’s all I have.
He came to the village around the next bend, but the road carried on south, towards where the land dipped and then disappeared into the sea, and Zach was suddenly unwilling to arrive. He had so little idea of what he would do when he did that he felt uneasy, almost afraid. He accelerated again, and carried on through the village, another mile or so, till the lane ended at a small, weed-strewn parking area. There was a faded orange-and-white life buoy, an abrupt sign warning of tides and submerged rocks, and a crumbling lip of land beneath which the gray sea rolled in, choppy and restless.

Zach considered his next move. He knew for a fact that the house Charles Aubrey had rented as his summer house was no more—other people had tried to visit it, but it had burned down at some point in the 1950s, and not even the foundations were visible anymore. The exact spot had been built over in the 1960s, by the council road that formed a large loop to the southwest of the village. He watched the white froth of the sea for a few minutes. The water looked cold and hostile as it broke over the rocky shore, constantly moving, seething. He could hear it grumbling beneath the higher sound the wind made, parting around his car. This sound, and the flat gray light, suddenly seemed desolate, seemed to echo around the emptiness inside him, magnifying it unbearably. He felt as though he barely existed, and he fought the feeling, thinking hard.

Blacknowle was where it had all started. The rift between his grandparents, the distance between his father and his grandpa that had hurt his father so. This was where Aubrey had cast his spell over Zach’s family, and this was where the man’s memory still held thrall. Where pictures that both had to be and couldn’t be by Aubrey were quietly emerging for sale from some hiding place. Zach opened the car door. He’d thought it would be cold; had pulled his shoulders up in anticipation, ready to shiver. Tensed against an onslaught that didn’t come. The breeze was warm and moist, and now it was in his ears it sounded excited, enthusiastic. An ebullient, thrumming sound, not a moan at all. Minute speckles of water landed on his skin and seemed to rouse him, waking him from a trance he hadn’t known he was in. He took a deep breath. Locking the car behind him, Zach walked to the edge of the low cliff. A narrow path ran unevenly through tan-colored earth and rocks to the beach, and without a second thought he began to pick his way down it, skidding on loose scree until he reached the bottom. He made his way across the rocks to the shoreline, crouched down on one large, flat boulder, and dipped his fingers into the water. It was shockingly cold. As a child, he’d have been in, regardless. He’d never seemed to feel the cold, although there were pictures of him, skinny in saggy wet trunks, grinning over a bucket of prawns, with his lips quite blue.

Beneath the water the dull rocks came alive in shades of gray and brown, black and white. Some of the clots of foam floating nearby were an unhealthy yellow, but the water was glassily clear. Sometimes things were too big, Zach suddenly thought. They were too big to step back and look at them all at once. Doing so was overwhelming, frightening. You had to get up close, look at each constituent part, and tackle something of a manageable size first. Start small. Build up to the bigger picture. He put his fingers back into the water and touched a flat rock that had a bright white stripe running across its exact center. He thought about painting it, sifting through colors in his mind to find the exact blend he would need to re-create the cold water, the immaculate stone. He wasn’t sure if he still could, but it had been many, many months since he’d even felt the urge to try. Calmer, Zach stood up and dried his fingers on the seat of his jeans. His stomach rumbled hotly, so he went back to the car and back to Blacknowle, where he’d passed a promising-looking pub.

The Spout Lantern was a crooked building, with walls of Portland stone beneath an undulating tiled roof. The hanging baskets outside were dry and leggy at the end of the season, with strings of brown lobelia trailing from them; the sign showed a curious-looking metal lamp with a handle on top and a long, tapering tube sticking out from one side—it looked more like a misshapen watering can than anything else. The pub sat in the center of the village, where the buildings clustered around a tiny green and crossroads. The pub was the only amenity he could see; a faded Hovis sign painted on the wall of one cottage spoke of a long-gone shop; a letterbox in the wall of another told of a vanished post office. Inside, the pub was cool and shady with that familiar, sour background smell of beer and people that was no longer masked by cigarette smoke. An elderly couple were eating fish and chips at a small table near the fireplace, even though the fireplace was empty and swept clean for the summer. Their whippet eyed Zach dolefully as he crossed to the bar and ordered half a pint and some ham sandwiches. The barman was friendly and highly vocal. He spoke too loudly in the quiet room and made the whippet wince.

A few other people were scattered farther along the room, eating lunch and talking in hushed voices. Zach suddenly felt too conspicuous to take a table by himself, so he stayed at the bar, sliding onto a stool and peeling off his sweater.

“Looks cold but it isn’t, is it? Funny sort of day,” the barman said cheerfully, passing Zach his drink and taking his money.

“You don’t know how right you are,” Zach agreed. The barman smiled curiously. He spoke with a home-counties accent at odds with his rustic appearance—a battered flannel shirt and canvas trousers that were frayed and thready around the pockets and hems. He looked about fifty, and had curls of gray hair reaching down to his collar, growing in a ring around a bald pate.

“So what brings you to Blacknowle? Holiday? Looking for a second home?”

“No, no. Nothing like that. I’m actually . . . doing some research.” Zach felt suddenly uneasy about saying so, as if once this was known he would have to act differently. Act as if he knew what he was doing. “Into an artist who used to live near here,” he pressed on. In the mirror behind the bar, he saw the elderly couple by the fire pause when they heard this, a gradual slowing of movement, then a halt. They stopped fiddling with the food on their plates, stopped chewing. Exchanged a look between them that Zach couldn’t read but that made the back of his neck prickle. The barman had cast a glance in their direction, too, but he quickly looked back at Zach and smiled.